A Model TrILBY; or, What Are You Reading Now, Winter 2016/17

A successor to The Decline and Fall 2016 of gILBert the fILBert: What Are You Reading Now?

Read that Laurie Penny sci-fi novella, 's all right. Now reading Arendt on Socrates.

lol you couldn't have waited one day

as 2017 comes into view, I'm reading don quixote and john berryman's recovery. we'll see how the year goes.

Time waits for no one, wins
And it won't wait for ILB

Oliver Twist

wins what don quixote translation are you reading? i am waiting on tobias smollett's to come in the mail. (i've read edith grossman, which was good as far as i can tell but man i really like warty 18th century translations and their uh often creative fealty to the mother text.)

Bits of a load of turn of the 80s Music Press that my brother had in attic. Largely NMEs. But not going to have time to do them justice. Wish I could take them with me.

The Naked Woman by Desmond Morris. He goes over the female form head to toe in ja revised update of an earlier work which had covered both genders.

Another Side of Bob Dylan by Victor Maymudes. One time Dylan tour manager has book constructed post humously by his son from a set of tapes he'd dictated.

New Ugly Things arrived in Rough Trade on Thursday. Have looked through and read some reviews.
Wish they'd used some contrast colour on the cover is the one quibble I'd have so far.
Also odd that Kings of The Wild Frontier gets reviewed in there, or maybe not.

xp I'm reading the ormsby (not gonna lie, this is down to it being the best-looking ebook ed I could get for pennies); it's great so far, I've read that it has been criticised for being too faithful to the point of confusing syntax but I'm not getting that at all

I've spent the break reading art books. I read:

Marianne Barrucand and Achim Bednorz - Moorish Architecture in Andalusia
Ernst van de Wetering - Rembrandt: The Painter Thinking
Michelangelo Muraro and Paolo Marton - Venetian Villas
Erwin Panofsky - Perspective as Symbolic Form
Peter Humfrey - Titian

Also Maurice Merleau-Ponty's amazing essay "Eye and Mind", which has convinced me that I need to be reading MMP this coming year.

Speaking of naked women, am reading Kelley Swain's The Naked Muse, a poet/science-writer's memoir of being a nude artist's model: very good
Also, as referred to on redshifted science books thread, Ed Yong: I Contain Multitudes, fascinating book on the microbiome

happy new year, ilb :)

i'm reading

Rick Perlstein - Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

which tells the story of how the Republican Party became conservative. while thickly descriptive, the pacing feels breakneck and boy does the writing go down smooth, making for a thrilling + highly addictive read. looking forward to Perlst's Nixon and Reagan books

Anyone here read David Carr's The Year of the Gun and can say it's qualitatively better fhan just reading the shorter magazine feature version?

It's not.

So toward the end of the previous What Are You Reading I was thanking everybody who told me to read The Last Samurai, and we were raising a glass for that and Lightning Bolts and their author and I just "finished" TLS but sure I'm not done with it it, however on first read I eventually felt like I was attending A Thousand And One Night Schools, being tested like a samurai okay, but also it's Seekers vs. sheeple like couldn't Red go into counselling isn't that an obvious option is his crusading wife really so clueless also lots of convenient coincidences and also minute descriptions of physical settings are not always of any discernible point other than Reading Assignments as a point of discipline maybe, for the reader submitting to such but speaking of Red omg, wish we could have gotten to him sooner anyway I probably shouldn't have devoured so much of it so quickly during the last third but did get hooked and will re-read at least some of it thanks again.

And your hunch that you would like it seems pretty plausible, Scott (I greatly enjoyed most of it despite some reservations so far).

am a third of the way into döblin's berlin alexanderplatz in jolas' near contemporary translation: more or less renders the prose into 30s americanese but reads nicely imo (would seem whoever did the subtitles for the fassbinder adaptation must have relied heavily on this, cos there have been a fair number of déjà vu moments)

That is getting a new Michael Hoffman translation this year, which i intend to use as my intro

yeah, i'd definitely be interested in reading other translations of this. there was also an eighties penguin with a newer translation (think it has an otto dix painting on the cover) that i see around occasionally.

reading the slaughterhouse section i kept having visual flashbacks to franju's blood of the beasts documentary :-/

I read "The Treasure" by Selma Lagerlöf, 1904, which is equal parts ghost story, Icelandic saga and feminist fairy tale. V brief, vg.

Bruce Springsteen, BORN TO RUN

As usual I'm reading several books at once.

I'm making my way slowly through Adorno's Minima Moralia, re-reading constantly but still feeling like I'll have to go back through the whole thing ... it's strenuous but enjoyable.

Trying to get some context for Adorno, I read Peter Stirk's Critical Theory, Politics and Society: An Introduction -- a very dry survey, but more or less what I needed, and useful for ideas for further reading.

I'm about 200 pages into the first fat volume of Outlaws of the Marsh (Shapiro translation). It's fantastically entertaining, though I can't keep track of all the characters. It's startling to encounter every 1970s kung fu movie trope already fully formed in a 14th century text. I thought the episodic structure might be boring, but I'm finding it easy to put down and pick up again.

After enjoying a number of early 20th century books on jujutsu, I'm working on Gracie and Danaher's 2003 Mastering Jujitsu. Surprisingly, it starts with a thorough and well-researched historical survey, though most of the book is about modern MMA tactics and techniques. In terms of organization and thoroughness, it's one of the better practical martial arts texts I've seen. The publisher, Human Kinetics, is a good source for professionally-oriented works on sports and fitness.

Just read and *adored* The Bookshop, following discussion in previous thread. Now starting Month in the Country, which is also delightful. Many thanks, I would never have picked either up otherwise.

That is getting a new Michael Hoffman translation this year

o wau

sometimes i find myself just out and about, whatever, thinking, oh poor franz biberkopf

Franz Biberkopf ist schon wieder da!

Wonderful Wonderful Times - Elfriede Jelinek
No Quarter: The Three Lives of Jimmy Page - Martin Power

The Glass Key - Hammett

Chuck - I think the magazine version is sufficient

I recently read Sam Quinones' Dreamland, and in retrospect would have rather just read a magazine version. So much repetition...

i really enjoyed it but yeah, it did need a good edit. was willing to forgive him tho - he was a bit overly happy with his theories and repeated them a lot, but they were good theories and his frame for the book was all quite nice. i'd blame the editor.

I enjoyed it too and learned a lot, but I thought he / the editors could have supposed that some stories, like how the Xalisco Boys ran their show, were well-established after being told once or twice, instead of being repeated again and again. I also didn't understand what the divisions into parts signified. But yeah, those are editing rather than journalism choices.

it definitely is too long. also he repeats the pizza comparison about 20 times. to me the divisions were meant to split the book into diff parts of america i guess, and the two forms of drug addiction converging. but prob at some point that split becomes meaningless.

Timothy Egan's The Big Burn, seems in some ways a thematic as well as chronological prequel to his National Book Award-winning The Worst Hard Time, about the Dust Bowl.This is about the or a great natural and man-made/-contributing disaster of 1910, resulting from and in certain shifts/resistance, but subtitle The Fire That Saved America is of course optimistic and not at all suggested by the author. "Fire makes its own weather," and its own culture, apparently. Cuts and burns through the dry forest of facts just so.

Getting to the end of A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. If I'd been informed beforehand that it was basically torture porn I wouldn't have started. However if you loved the conceited bright young things of A Secret History and are a fan of extremely sordid real (not real) life trauma stories then run don't walk to your nearest bookshop to get this.

i'm juggling a few things at the moment, including:

john burnside: something like happy (read a story of his over xmas and bought this, i like it so far, like a more reflective carver)
livia llewellyn - furnace (i read a recommendation of this, it's horror, a bit genre maybe and the stories are quite lurid and disgusting but some of the writing is nice)
jon mcgregor - this isn't the sort of thing that happens to someone like you (i like some of the stories in this, others are a bit too deliberately ordinary)

Dance of Days the book on punk in Washington DC. Got as far as the forming of Minor Threat as I traveled yesterday.
Birthday present from my brother.

Was that mention of Biberkopf a few messages back the same character from Berlin, Alexanderplatz that Chris Bohn took his pen name from? Saw bits of the TV version when it was on in the 80s and have wanted to rewatch it since. Might read it now.

Finished SPQR by Mary Beard, those Romans sure were wacky. Engaging and of course lots of stuff I didn't know one thing about but it felt a bit slight in a way, would like to read a more academic work by her maybe.
The Name of the Rose - going down easy, it's right up my alley, RIP Umberto Eco
Letters from Russia, Custine - slow and sporadic going but dude's a trip
New Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare - I'm on the introductory essay, tempted to just try to read the canon cover to cover

Was that mention of Biberkopf a few messages back the same character from Berlin, Alexanderplatz that Chris Bohn took his pen name from?

right, couldn't find the first post when I was looking at it on my phone. So may need to read this new translation, or is the older one better?

Not sure if I'd be up for hours of watching with subtitles. I tend to be doing a couple of things at the same time these days so having to keep up with subtitles and sew or something has been a problem. meant that I couldn't get as into the Americans as I might have done otherwise since kept getting hit with having to read translations from the Russian.
But since I only caught part of the Channel 4 showing I would really like to rewatch the tv series. I think I missed the first episodes but what I saw I enjoyed.

Finally reading Pale Fire by Nabokov, loving every minute of it.

Also dipping into Electric Light by Seamus Heaney and Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel.

Jean-Henri Fabre's The Life of the Grasshopper. More sex and sadism than an Ian Fleming novel.

Erwin Panofsky's Early Netherlandish Painting

I'm enjoying it a lot, but I can't imagine how anyone read it before Google Image Search. The black and white plates are totally inadequate to get a sense of these pieces, and many pieces with extensive discussion aren't even reproduced. What is a reader in 1953 supposed to get out of an unillustrated description of an obscure crucifixion panel? Maybe you're just supposed to know it all already. At least there isn't too much untranslated Latin. Panofsky's a great writer, but this book is very slow-moving and closely reasoned, moreso than anything else I've read of his. He doesn't take any shortcuts, which I don't mind, even if I'm currently in a third chapter on pre-Eyckian book illumination. Jan van Eyck is definitely the protagonist. Everything so far seems to be preparing the stage for him.

Erwin Panofsky's Early Netherlandish Painting

"― jmm, Sunday, January 8, 2017 3:15 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink"

I highly recommend this book if you can afford it or find it in a library - my dad has a copy and its easily the nicest art book I've ever seen.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51uBemSstcL._SX258_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

I'm enjoying it a lot, but I can't imagine how anyone read it before Google Image Search.

This was what it was like reading Susan Sontag's 'On Photography'. The times when I was reading it on a bus, away from a computer, were not helpful.

I recently took another break from Robert Gordon's "The Rise and Fall of American Growth" to read "Wolf in White Van" by John Darnielle. I had a cross-country airplane trip to look forward to, which is usually my best opportunity for sustained, uninterrupted reading time. I read half the book on the way over, and the other half on the way back. I can relate to the narrator's immersion in DIY fantasy world role-playing and text-based adventures. I'm old enough to remember older brothers of friends who played games like ZORK on primitive PCs, though not quite old enough to have played them myself. I never heard of a play-by-mail game - I suspect the author may have invented the concept. It is a good fit for a bookish and (understandably) anti-social character, and it resonates in faintly symbolic ways with the book's other theme of living with the consequences of a violently self-destructive adolescent choice. Although the narrator at one point claims to hate mysteries (contrasting them unfavorably with his favored genres of pulp fantasy and sci-fi) the book reads like a mystery - not a whodunit, but a whydunit. And instead of dropping hints to lead up to the big reveal, the narrator patiently closes off possible explanations. The reader can't help but try to figure out why the narrator did what he did, but the book doesn't really provide much assistance there. Rather it seems to be a sort of quiet celebration of survival, with not thinking about the why perhaps being part of an essential coping mechanism.

Play by mail games definitely existed. I rember all the ads for them in old issues of dragon and white dwarf, and puzzling over who had both the patience and $ to play them.
http://www.tomeoftreasures.com/research_forums/crasimoffsworld.jpg
http://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/DFQAAOSwnDZT~5Pi/s-l300.jpg

Those covers go with the scenes, settings, environments in the novel:reduced and reductive, on the face of it, but still with enough detail, muscles in the line drawings etc., you can tell life goes on there somewhere. somehow, and the subsistence level, low-grade fever is easy to relate to when you're a teen (for instance), so let's go inside. Something about the desert just under and between the Southern California green, but also the grassier Midwestern flats in the game and its real life equivalent and the hospital room ceiling and the nickel bags and paperbacks and groping of high school parking lot, the house he still lives in and the front yard and the walk to the store and good talk with two lost stoners of the present day. You nailed a lot more of it, o.nate. John D.'s got a new book out next month.

@TriciaLockwood
remembering a dude I met in Norway who wrote a book about "a race of immortal superheroes whose job it was to make everything more calm"

@TriciaLockwood
when an american writes a calm book it's like Stoner or something & makes people wanna cut their hands off. get with the norwegians on this

Review copies of John D's new book come in specially-made VHS covers, which fits its theme, and I wish I could get hold of one :(

i just read 'In a Grove' by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. i've never seen Rashomon. re-read it a few times trying to puzzle together the opposing accounts, but getting confused about who is wearing a blue kimono ~,~

The film's no clearer 8)

Was also remade set in the West and starred William Shatner and that's worth a look too.

One of Us will likely disappoint you, Aimless. It's a muddle.

Karl Ove Knaugard - My Struggle, Book Three
Derek Walcott - The Bounty

mah struggle

hehe

that will never stop amusing me

It's a muddle.

I'll look for the small redeeming qualities.

Yeah -- Cather's always worth reading.

so far this year...

Dava Sobel - The Glass Universe
Kind of a literary prequel to Hidden Figures, about the women "computers" who helped map the sky in the early days of modern astronomy. Sobel isn't flashy by any means but equally adept at illuminating human lives and explaining hard science to laypeople.

Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind - Occasional Essays
Zadie Smith - Swing Time
Collected essays are by nature a mixed bag but the standard is pretty high here. Skipped the film reviews, may go back to them. currently reading Swing Time and am floored by the 1990s media world depiction, so true. LOL "freebism - the practice of giving things to people with no need of them." welcome to my CD collection :)

Ulysses S. Grant - Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant Volumes 1 & 2
Mentioned this before, can't recommend enough. Utterly remarkable how un-dated much his prose and perceptions read today.

Tana French - The Likeness
There's an acute psychological twist to this crime novel but ffs is it overlong, I mean accruing details sure why not but I was deeply annoyed by these characters ultimately. Reminiscent of Ms Donna Tart in that regard and oh yeah French boldly borrows plot from The Secret History along the way.

Dawn Powell - A Time To Be Born
Maybe the best novel I've read by her? Lacerating. Funny and melancholy social satire set in 1940 NYC. Thinking about trying her Diaries next.

Jan Willen vänder Wetterling - Hard Rain
Another bizarre shaggy-dog crime novel in the Amsterdam Cops series.

Andrew Lownie - Stalin’s Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring
Basically read this with my jaw hanging open at Guy's compulsive dissolution and outrageous behavior. And yeah, spying. The more I read about these events, the more I think "how on earth did they get away with it as long as they did?"

It's by far her best novel, Mark.

Finished Lethem, A GAMBLER'S ANATOMY. His most bizarre book. One of the few things that makes a bit of sense or just about fits in: what feels a lot of homage to Pynchon.

In March I've been reading a bunch of things from the 30s or relating to it. Ramon Del Valle-Inclan's Tyrant Banderas is a recent-ish first time translation courtesy of NYRB where several scenes from a revolution (taking place smack on the Day of the Dead, natch) are not so much written as sprinkled on the page (note to self: use other words than fragementary). Short, intense, sharp with layers that'll reveal on re-reads. Has a terrific last paragraph. Tabucchi's Declares Pereira is an evocation of Salazar's Portugal, at the time of Spanish revolution. I had read a couple of things by Tabucchi in the past that were nice enough but this is next level. Tabucchi found his subject and the phrasing and the tics and runs with it in an unstoppable desk-performance, around a man who has to take an action out in the world. Really one of the great books of the last 30 years. Onto Buddhism with Soseki's The Gate (this time an NYRB re-translation), a novel which almost mirrors a not-very-much-happens type of film (the intro mentions Ozu but for me it had the rhythms of a Kore-eda as well, especially Maburosi), where the meaning of a life is questioned for a few minutes - an interiority is seen, exercised for a little while then...left.

Finished stories by Jaroslav Hasek, in a collection entitled Red Commissar. I sorta admired Svejk, whereas this particular collection - with several bunch of stories that cover several times in his life (a few around the time he took a job in a pharmacy) give the full range of his anarchist imagination. There are a few Soldier Svejk stories too. The last story, this portrait of a Macedonian butcher has a hilarious turn (it centres from around the time he founded a political party).

Johnny Marr, SET THE BOY FREE

How is that, the pinefox?

Just read Pereira recently too, and thoroughly endorse xyzzzz's acclaim

James Redd: I am only about 40pp in out of 400. It is plainly written and clear. It is the childhood stuff; will probably get more interesting.

There are moments where you could (as people do, and I think did with Morrissey) take out a sentence and say: 'who said this - Johnny Marr or Alan Partridge?'.

T-Rex were a big early band for him: clearly a key formative influence on Marr, Morrissey, Paul Morley (for whom 'ride a white swan' is the formative 45); perhaps Simon Reynolds also.

I've had T-Rex's "Life's A Gas" stuck in my head for weeks now. I don't have any strong emotional attachment to Bolan and realise he probably rhymed it with "I hope it's gonna last" because it's an easy rhyme but still bums me out a bit every time.

My fav Tabucchi anecdote is when he visited Portugal after the revolution and was astonished to learn that a major Portuguese poet and her husband addressed each other formally ("você"); "I didn't know there were communists like that!".

He was crazy for Portugal; one of the very few authors I know of who's written about the Azores (where I grew up).

Pereira was my first by him, and I need to find more. Any recommendations on what to read next.

hai guys

I discovered St. Aubyn

I'll have to ask my aunt, she's the Tabucchi fan. I only read Pereira and then noticed how the guy keeps popping up in articles/biographies of Portuguese authors I enjoy.

This looks like a good piece on Tabucchi: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/06/04/italys-seriously-playful-genius/

I finished Jeremy Treglown's biography of Henry Green. I know more about Henry Green now than I did before I read it.

Now I have started "The Invisible Player" by Giuseppe Pontiggia, on the ever-reliable Eridanos Press.

almost done with Chris Hayes' new one A Colony in a Nation. very very good, I liked his last book Twilight of the Elites, as well. he's a bit of a weeny, but just the right balance of earnestness with none of the cute affectations or pretensions of his colleagues at MSNBC.

A cute weeny, though.

he's adodrable. His first book was in essence an excellently written master's thesis stretched to unforgiving book lelngth.

I have no interest in reading him. Or listening to him either, really. But when the hubby has MSNBC on, I will occasionally look up from whatever I'm reading during his show.

What is a weeny?

a weeny is: the CTRL + F search term I'll use to find last posts, thanks!

Would recommend Hassan Blasim (The Iraqi Christ, The Madman of Freedom Square, (UK) both collected in The Corpse Exhibition (US)
A good overview is the book he edited, Iraq +100, with lots of youngish writers in it Thanks for the reminder, James; meant to check this guy out ever since your prev. rec. on Rolling Speculative etc.

Just finished the Lydia Davis mix of Swann's Way and wishing she could have already done all volumes, for my convenience and jones. Seriously---haven't gotten into her own stories yet, but this is great---and I'm pretty sure I'd think so even if I hadn't eventually dodged an Odettesque bullet, with lots of Swann-like mentalism along the way. Grieve's got a tough act to follow, but Proust will come through no matter what. (Hope so, since I may get past Volume 4 before Penguin Classics Deluxe does.)

Peter Higgins: Wolfhound Century -- clever, beautifully written fantasy set in alternative 1920-ish Russia, about a police officer trying to uncover a conspiracy against the state; the Tunguska Event, or something very like it, is a vast stone archangel which has fallen from space and become buried/fused with the Earth's crust. First of a trilogy, which I would normally use as an excuse to avoid, but this is good enough that I've ordered the other 2 books already.

I'm nearing the end of Cather's One of ours and Alfred is right that it is not up to the level of her best. When I'm finished with it I'll try to sum up my few thoughts on where it fails. (NB: She won a Pulitzer for this novel.)

nathalie sarraute: the age of suspicion (essays on the novel)

includes mentions of henry green and ivy compton-burnett, the latter of whom i'm finally going to attempt after finishing this

If you enjoy Green's long passages of dialogue-only-or-mostly---rather than being spoonfed by a narrator, unreliable or possibly otherwise---you may well dig Burnett, but forewarning: in the ones I've read, she sticks to family life, twisted implications by lamplight (she's great).

i have yet to read any green (will pick up the picador collection next time i see a copy), but your description there fits nicely with the one sarraute novel i've read so far. the i c-b i have is a family and a fortune, no idea where it stands within her canon.

hai guys

I discovered St. Aubyn

[waits...]

I bought the Dawn Powell online based on the squib review above, looks great

tried my 1st green (loving) earlier this yr and had trouble w it

sadly too, cuz my main impetus was updikes recommendations re: green

& relatedly, just abt finished w updike's 'the centaur' - has some great stuff in it, beautifully captured coming of age insights & fears; v mature writing

So, I finished One of Ours. I won't disrespect it as a bad novel, because it isn't. It shows a lot of Cather's usual strengths, but as Alfred put it, it is a bit of a muddle.

It was published in 1922 and must have been written in 1920-21. It's apparent that Cather quickly understood that WWI had radically altered the lives of about two million young American men and it would inevitably alter the course of the USA. But she can't do much in the book with that insight, because it was far too soon to decide what any of this cataclysmic change would lead to. Instead, the first 4/5 of the novel just follows the rather misshapen development and thwarted idealism of a rather sad-sack Nebraska farm boy named Claude. Consequently, the novel seems like a strange hybrid, combining a Nebraska-centric follow-on to the success of My Antonia with her still-nebulous insight about how American lives were about to change direction in some large way due to the war.

This between-two-stools quality may account for another of the weaker aspects of the book, which is a tendency toward hazy romanticism and sentimentality that runs counter to Cather's usual spare verbiage and clarity of observation. The book often stops dead in its tracks to heave in a paragraph of somewhat overwrought "fine writing" about nature. She also indulges in musings about how fine and upstanding young American manhood is, and how idealistic! There's a definite hangover quality in the book from the heavy war propaganda that flooded the USA in 1917-18. I suspect these delicate concessions to popular sentiments that only weaken the book are some of the very qualities that led the Pulitzer committee to select this book.

If you enjoy Cather (as I do), it's worth reading, but there are at least three or four of her other books you should read before this one.

reading lots of short stories this year fsr. Ted Chiang, then George Saunders, now reading Carver Cathedral

I suspect these delicate concessions to popular sentiments that only weaken the book are some of the very qualities that led the Pulitzer committee to select this book.

This is a good observation, whether it's true or not

flops what did you think of the Saunders audiobook? I think I tried a story of his once and it was too cutesy even for me, but I was probably just in a pissy mood

I read 10th of December mostly in a non-pissy mood, but too much (not all) of it was too cutesy indeed, also increasingly predictable and he lifted at least one plot, though not the right one, because it didn't help. Maybe he's better as a novelist? More often it seems like good short story writers can seem overextended as novelists, but some writers need the room.

xps wins-

the most prominently featured voice (about 30% up to the point i stopped) was Nick Offerman and I couldn't deal

imo (speaking as a Huge Saunders fan) he permanently walks the knife-edge of 'too cutesy' and 99% of the time pulls off the tight rope walk to spectacular results. But having offerman read throws it completely off and into twee middlebrow hell. shame as some of the other voices were quite good. and I love the recordings I've heard of Saunders himself reading stories from Tenth of December. having many voices worked with the disjointed format of the book and everything, shame about that one casting call... i will definitely read it tho

I suspect u may just not like him dow. he's pretty divisive. 10th of December p representative. i read him for the lols + for the warm feeling i get that he's a nice cool funny dude

Somewhere I saw Cather quoted to the effect that the Nebraska boy in One of Ours was based on a cousin, whom she didn't like and had as little contact with as possible, but she felt compelled to write about him and his fate---didn't know him very well, trying too hard to fill in the blanks---? I haven't read the book, but from those comments, expected the character to be something like doomed space cadet in "Paul's Case" (re William Carlos Williams' "The pure products of America go crazy").

I'll give him another go - I said "even for me" because I have a high threshold for cutesiness and often like it

Yes I'll give him another go too---anyway, my mixed feelings as reported last month on G
George's own thread:

Most of Tenth of December seemed overwrought and and/or too crafty, also maybe not crafty enough, re pattern recognition---if a hyper and otherwise goofy boychild and an old man with dementia are wandering the same landscape, of course they're eventually going to come into proximity and have A Saunders Moment, very painterly. But did like for instance when the way the Unstable War Vet, the kind that used to be standard on TV etc. before vets pretty much vanished from TV etc, gets re-absorbed into the family dynamic, for a while--and of course might actually freak out etc. later, with family members getting some measure of blame, suspicion etc; Saunders does always seek some kind of verisimilitude, and there he gets it. But overall, I think Karen Russell's Vampires In The Lemon Grove is much better at social commentary x imaginative writing, with no overselling.
I'll prob read some more Saunders----Civilwarland In Bad Decline was pretty good, I take it?

really fascinating nonfic book about film collectors (mostly from the '50s through the '80s), A Thousand Cuts.

Aidan Chambers, Dance On My Grave
Jim Grimsley, Dream Boy
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive
Raziel Reid, When Everything Feels Like the Movies
Tim Federle, Better Nate Than Ever
Tim Federle, Five, Six, Seven, Nate!
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Oh, how is that Grimsley? Read an excerpt of something, saw him on a panel in New Orleans, with Rick Bragg and Dorothy Allison, via BookTV.org---both glimpses quite a while back, but impressive.

Dream Boy is fairly well regarded in queer lit circles, and I certainly cannot fault his prose (my thesis supervisor described it as "having a kind of haze over it," which'll make sense to anyone who has read it), but I disliked the way in which the main character was defined solely in terms of his (constant) victimhood. The Aidan Chambers book that I listed above is an ideal counterpoint, I think, focusing upon a queer death (not a spoiler; we know who dies from the very beginning) as a means of reflecting upon a life and a relationship, rather than simply a martyr-in-training.

After reading a few of Wm. Carlos Williams's essays as an appetizer, I started reading The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake, Samuel Bawlf, because I need to intersperse some non-fic in among the novels to cleanse my palate so to speak. So far, it is rehashing the history of Cabot, Frobisher, the search for the NW passage, the Armada, etc., but this stuff does have a tangential connection to Drake's circumnavigation of the earth and the author is willing to be brief about it, so I forgive him.

My main interest is reading about Drake's exploration of the Oregon and Pacific NW coast, which will probably get big play later in the book, even if most of the details will be deduction and guesswork. Other than Drake, almost no Europeans came within 500 miles of that area for another two centuries.

Raduan Nassar's Ancient Tillage is so good - his speaking out against Brazilian government austerity is also a model in the way a writer conducts himself in public life - although he hasn't been active since this was published in the mid-70s (which is perhaps another example to writers). Mostly made up of a series short, intense chapters where time and space are slowed and you are fully soaked in nature, sex, rebellion and God - written in this modernistic-style prose. Maybe its the power of modernistic prose, that it can partially shade these things in another mode entirely on the page that give it a different sensibility - Nassar feels fully in command of that.

Agustin Fernandez Mallo - Nocilla Experience. This is almost the first piece of fiction I've read that has tried to LOL respond to globalisation. My problem is I'm kinda sniffy about globalisation - I'd rather it fell apart as a conversation first (its always been something that is not really there, really, a cover for horrible policies and a world that is faaling to pieces). The prose is as flat as you like - and actually you wouldn't have it any other way. People/where/what they find themselves in develop as fragments (and their fragments are taken up 20+ pages after, very 'Short Cuts' I suppose). Its the kind of fiction you could run out of town by simply destroying the theory behind it - and the music he likes. Its like a very technocratic way of doing fiction (Mallo is a Physicist, an 'expert' in other words).

Spring thread time?

Done. ILB Gripped the Steps and Other Stories. What Are You Reading Now, Spring 2017